09/16/96 TEAMWORK AGAIN

TEAMWORK AGAIN

RESTORING PROSPERITY
How Workers and Managers Are Forging a New Culture of Cooperation
By Wellford W. Wilms
Times Business -- 323pp -- $25

Workers in Fremont, Calif., tell tales of an auto plant in disarray. General Motors cars rolling down the assembly line with mismatched doors and trunks, some with discarded lunches and chicken bones in the front seats. Entrepreneurs selling liquor at $2 a shot in the parking lot. A shop floor reeking of marijuana. Hookers working the gates. And as you might imagine, labor-management relations from hell.
Into this one-time industrial inferno--now run by a GM-Toyota Motor joint venture known as New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI)--walked University of California at Los Angeles professor Wellford W. Wilms and his graduate students. Their mission: to catalog the reengineering efforts at NUMMI and three other West Coast manufacturing sites: the jointly operated U.S. Steel-POSCO steel mill, Douglas Aircraft, and the test and measurement division of Hewlett-Packard. The results, published in Restoring Prosperity, represent dramatic turnarounds.
Employing loads of interviews with workers and managers, Wilms takes us through the rough times and shows how the four companies remade themselves. The lessons, familiar ones by now, are that workers and managers must learn to trust one another and cooperate if they are to save American manufacturing. And at high-tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, customers must be brought into product development.
Sound new and fresh? Hardly. And that's the problem with Restoring Prosperity. For all his good intentions and copious research, Wilms spins familiar yarns--and aging ones at that. By now, most business readers know plenty about the trends toward teamwork, training, and continuous quality improvement at such places as Saturn and Motorola. Wilms's book delivers much of the same, but since it lacks new analysis, the edition is no more than a quartet of lengthy case studies.
In fact, the stories read like formulas--the kind one often hears on factory visits. In the evil, inefficient past, workers and managers spent too much time at loggerheads. Then came a crisis, threatening both sides. They talked, negotiated, and hammered out a more sensible scheme. Now, things are better.
If Wilms had spent more time questioning the new status quo and less time on the bad old days of pot smoke and chicken bones, Restoring Prosperity would be a far more valuable book.
By Stephen Baker